Pain Studies

"Pain Studies is a book-length lyric essay at the intersection of pain, perception, and language. Through the prism of migraine, Pain Studies episodically and idiosyncratically explores personal, cultural, medical, and literary histories of pain--how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it--and undertakes extended engagements with a range of sources including the trial testimony of Joan of Arc, the television show House, M.D., rhetorical attributes of pre-Socratic philosophy and mathematical proofs, essays by Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scar[r]y, and the perception-based work of artists…